US Goverment and Patents

FYI, two weeks ago I attended the Computer & Communications Industry
Association (http://www.ccianet.org/) 2005 Summit in Washington. I was
invited as a member of an open source project.

It was a great opportunity for our project to get visibility in
Washington among industry lobbyist and government officials. The caucus
covered a few major areas: computer security, identity theft, patent
reform, and homeland security.

One good piece of news is that the US patent problems are clearly
recognized by the government and new legislation is being worked on to
try to fix some of the existing software patent problems. That
legislation might be passed this year. The goal is to try to prevent
trivial patents and to make patent challenges easier/cheaper. One issue
I expressed there is how vulnerable open source is to patent attacks
because we don't have money to defend even trivial challenges.

Here are a few PDF's written by the CCIA that I think addresses many of
the patent issues very clearly:

Open Source and Software Patents:
http://candle.pha.pa.us/ccia/Patent_Abstract.pdf

Software Patents:
http://candle.pha.pa.us/ccia/CCIA_Patent_Policy_2-pager.pdf

Detailed Patent Analysis:
http://candle.pha.pa.us/ccia/innovationrpt.pdf

Fairly Considering Open Source for Government Contracts:
http://candle.pha.pa.us/ccia/procurement2.pdf

I know some people were looking for a patent statement to put on our web
site. The first PDF would be an excellent choice.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
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